As a California resident in the UC system, I am familiar with Santa Cruz. Truthfully, I sort of view this new Visual Studies program like their pretty much now defunct history of consciousness program. While it was a progressive program when it was started, right now, to be brief, it has no senior professors and all the important scholars have retired. Most of their students take classes in, you guessed it, visual studies. Prestige isn't everything, but I wonder how much a shelf-life these interdisciplinary programs have. But of course selecting a program should be about who teaches there and if your interests mesh with the faculty, as others have pointed out.
I will say, though, that beach town Santa Cruz ain't anymore diverse than upstate New York. And everything there is incredibly expensive.
